Fresno Runner

Find your spark: An interview with Momentum Jewelry’s Amy Cochrane

What keeps you moving on those days every step feels like a mile? Have you had those days? I have. Most recently, I had one of those days at the Mountains 2 Beach marathon in Southern California. When I fell behind the last of my teammates, a dog on the side of the road briefly perked me up. A bit later, a local runner who recognized my team singlet called out some words of encouragement and gave me a pat on the back. When I least expected it, a teammate who wasn’t racing appeared from out of nowhere on the side of the road and cheered for me at the point I was just done. (I’m not entirely sure she wasn’t a hallucination.) And finally, in that last torturous mile, it was the knowledge that my husband and sons planned to be somewhere on the course to cheer for me.

If I’d been wearing a Momentum Jewelry Motivate Wrap, I might have found some additional inspiration by glancing at my wrist.

This was, in fact, how Minnesota’s Amy Cochrane came up with the idea for her motivational jewelry line, which features inspirational sayings stamped on aluminum pendants that can be worn on the wrist, shoe, or on a necklace.

Cochrane was inspired to create the accessories while working out. In the middle of a particularly intense plank, she glanced at her wrist and, as she writes on the company’s website, realized “I needed to find a way to put what drives me to challenge myself in a place where I can always see it when I need it!”

Suspecting others might be in need of similar motivation — not just during a tough workout, but throughout the day — she got to work at her kitchen table. The result was a workout-friendly bracelet she called the Motivate Wrap. In the winter of 2013, she says, took some wraps to a work conference in Philadelphia and was overwhelmed by the positive response she received: “People just loved it. I realized there’s a big market for this.”

Although she had a full-time job in the public health sphere, she began making the jewelry in her spare time. In that first year, she recalls, she was “stamping everything at my kitchen table, as fast as I [could.]”

Comfortable, durable, and washable, the Motivate Wrap consists of an aluminum tag attached to a soft, adjustable fabric wrap that comes in a variety of colors. Each tag is stamped with an message designed to inspire. The more than two dozen choices include mantras like “Find joy in the journey,” “Dig deep,” and “Nevertheless, she persisted,” as well as simpler words and phrases meant to evoke a specific race or distance, like “13.1” and “Tri.”

Other pieces in the line include Foot Notes, aluminum tags that can be attached to shoelaces; Sparklets, which are similar to the Motivate Wrap but with a colorful ribbon elastic in place of the fabric wrap; keychains called Inspire-rings; and necklaces. The company also works with individuals to create custom, one-of-a-kind tags emblazoned with their own messages.

Like many small businesses, Momentum owes much of its success to social media. “Things like Instagram, Facebook, fitness bloggers … it was perfect timing for me to be able to reach out to them to get the word out,” Cochrane says.

An ambassador program, which attracted nearly 1,000 applicants for the current period, has also helped build the community. In addition to wearing Momentum designs and promoting the brand on social media, ambassadors helped deploy the company’s 2015 Share the Spark campaign, which encouraged people to engage in a random act of kindness by giving a Momentum bracelet to anybody they might meet who needed “a little extra show of support.”

Cochrane is still a little overwhelmed by how her simple idea has inspired so many. “Our customers are awesome,” she says. “They take time to tell us what things mean to them. Every expo I’ve done, I have at least one person that starts crying at my booth. They’re reading through slogans and it just hits a nerve. They don’t do this at the Nike booth, I’m pretty sure about that.”

Get Momentum Jewelry

Momentum Jewelry can be purchased via the company’s online store. The company donates a portion of its profits to Action for Healthy Kids and Girls on the Run, two causes close to Cochrane’s heart. Now through August 31, 2017, Fresno Runner readers can receive a 15 percent off discount on all website orders placed with the code FresnoRunner15.

*Momentum Jewelry provided Fresno Runner with a Motivate Wrap and Footnote for the purpose of this feature.